Alcohol in Advertising

Why Advertise Alcohol? The Alcohol Industry Spends $3 BILLION Per Year on Advertising To try to open up new markets – to get groups that don’t drink much to drink more. Not only to get us to drink but to get us to develop certain attitudes about drinking. To increase market share Instead of increasing total consumption they want users to switch brands. To “normalize” drinking in the minds of young viewers???

Alcohol and Youth People who start drinking before the age of 15 are four times more likely to become addicted than those who wait until they are older Underage drinks account for 12% of all alcohol sales College alcohol market is over $5 billion a year. On an average day, 4 college students die in alcohol related accidents while 1,370 are injured. *Of course not all college students have drinking problems or even drink. In any environment a few people are doing most of the drinking. 10% of the drinking population consumes over 60% of all the alcohol sold.

Does Advertising Lead to Addiction? If everyone were to “drink responsibly” like they’re told to do in alcohol advertisements, alcohol sales would be down 80% FTC estimated that the alcohol industry spend approximately $6 billion or more on advertising and promotion in Why? USA Today found that teens say ads have a greater influence on their desire to drink in general than on their desire to buy a particular brand of alcohol Four college students die daily from alcohol-related causes. Between 2001 and 2005 youth exposure to alcohol advertising on t.v. increased by 41% from 1,973 ads to 46,854 ads.

FTC Recommendations Cant advertise in venues where more than 50% of the audience is under the legal drinking age. Prohibit ads with substantial underage appeal, even if they also appeal to adults, or target ads to persons 25 and older Restrict alcohol product placement to “R” and “NC-17” rated films, and apply ad placement standards to product placement on TV programs Curb on-campus and spring break sponsorships and advertising.

What makes young people drawn to Alcohol Advertising? Music Animal and people characters Humor Risky behavior – that provides in their view immediate gratification, thrills and/or social status.

Propaganda Techniques Bandwagon (everyone is doing it) Testimonial (celebrity endorsement) Transfer (transforming the product into something else) Glittering generalities (associating the product with a generalized value)

Bandwagon Everyone’s doing it!

Testimonial Celebrity Endorsement

Transfer

Glittering Generalities

Maxim 2003

How is alcohol portrayed?

Advertising & Nicotine Nicotine kills more people than all other drugs combined. It kills more Americans each year than alcohol, cocaine, heroin, car crashes, homicides, suicides, and Aids combined. The tobacco industry in the US spends over $9 BILLION per year on advertising and promotion – 26 Million per day! The tobacco industry needs 3000 new smokers a day to replace those who quit or die. – 2000 smokers quit every day and 1000 smokers die.

Advertising Cigs to Youth Almost 90% of smokers start before they’re % start before high school. If you don’t start smoking young, you’re not likely to start. The peak years for beginning to smoke are in grades 6 and 7. It takes only a few weeks for most people to become addicted to nicotine. While most teens would say they are not influenced by advertising, 88% of teenage smokers smoke one of 3 brands – Camel, Marlboro and Newport (the 3 most heavily advertised brands of cigarette.

What do you gather from this ad?

Colors used? Words?Font?Meaning?

Anti-smoking campaigns

Assignment Find an alcohol/tobacco ad Think of 5 adjectives to describe the ad How does the ad work to make alcohol/tobacco attractive Who is the target audience for the ad? In other words who does it appeal to. What feelings or emotions is the ad trying to associate with the product? How do gender, race and class feature in this ad? Is this ad socially responsible? What does it mean for an ad or company to be socially responsible?

Information taken from the following sites